Prof. Sharon Lang Featured

Prof. Sharon Lang will be January’s featured faculty author in the University of Redlands Bookstore.

Lang, a professor of anthropology, has been at the University of Redlands since 1997, and is the author of “Sharaf Politics: Honor and Peacemaking in Israeli-Palestinian Society.”

“This work was based on over three years of ethnographic research among Israeli-Palestinians and my doctoral manuscript, which received the Association for Israel Studies' Ben-Halperin Award,” Lang said. “It focuses on an indigenous process of conflict resolution known as ‘sulha,’ in addition to honor and the construction of male identity, and family honor killings.”

Lang has conducted ethnographic research in Israel, Japan, the United Kingdom and California, and published a number of articles on Israel-Palestinian matters and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), including "Life at the Cemetery," "The Anthropology of Motherhood," "Burying our Babies: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Parental Bereavement, Coping, and the Experience of Child Loss,” and "Bonds of Bereavement: Caregiving Among SIDS Mothers."

“Many of these works are being compiled, along with new pieces, into an edited volume entitled ‘Buried Anguish: A Personal Ethnography of SIDS Mothers,’” she said. “Currently I am serving as president of the Guild for Infant Survival of the Inland Empire, a non-profit organization dedicated to the eradication of SIDS, the support of bereaved SIDS families, and raising public awareness of the risks, facts, and myths of SIDS. Since my second child Micaela Kelani passed away from SIDS on Aug. 27, 2003, I have become a fully engaged member in the fight against SIDS, dedicated to writing anthropologically about SIDS survivors and bringing more cultural understanding of the plight of this community.”

Lang hopes that by having faculty authors on display in the bookstore, students will feel a deeper connection to their professors.

“By seeing our intellectual passions and accessing them more fully through our written work, students and the entire University community can experience our fields of expertise and join in the conversation of these particular areas of interest,” she said. “As professors, we are more than teachers of a few courses a few hours a week; most of us have lengthy, engaged, activist and intellectual lives."

The more students are exposed to their professors, Lang said, the more they will understand the depth of their knowledge.

"They can see how significant and interactive these intellectual endeavors truly are," she said. "Hopefully our academic works inspire students and demonstrate how exciting, meaningful, and fulfilling their own academic lives can and should be during their time at the University of Redlands and beyond.”